Vietnam’s photographic history, told by the winners

Patrick Chauvel was an 18-year-old rookie photographer looking for adventure
and a chance to witness history when he arrived in Vietnam in 1968.

He soon fell into a rhythm of photographing in the field for a few days and
returning to the comfort of Saigon, where he would drink and swap tales with
his fellow Western photographers at the Continental hotel. They often wondered
about the photographers on the other side who were receiving much more incoming
fire — even napalm — and could not enjoy the comfort of a hotel when their day
was done.

He and his colleagues sometimes lifted a glass for their unknown compatriots
on the other side.

In March 1973 Mr. Chauvel stood on the banks of the Thach Han River in Quang
Tri Province to photograph a rare prisoner exchange between the North and South
Vietnamese. He remembers feeling nervous that it might not come off as planned
as he saw North Vietnamese troops a few hundred feet away. He assumed there was
a photographer with them on the other side.

Chu Chi Thanh remembers that day just as clearly: He was the North
Vietnamese photographer on the other side of the river. As his North Vietnamese
compatriots were released, they jumped out of the boats, he recalled last week
at an exhibit of wartime photographs by North Vietnamese photographers that Mr.
Chauvel organized at the Visa Pour L’image festival in Perpignan, France.

“It was very emotional,” Mr. Thanh said. “The first thing they did when they
were separated from guards was jump off their boats, throw away their prisoner
clothes and run in the river towards their friends.”

Though the photographers were just a few hundred feet apart and were
probably specks in each other’s photos, Mr. Thanh’s experiences were so
different from Mr. Chauvel’s that they might as well have been a thousand miles
apart.

Mr. Thanh remembers talking that day with a South Vietnamese photographer
who crossed briefly with the released prisoners.

“I asked him why he photographed war and he said it was a job and while they
got paid for it, and they accepted the risk as a journalist, nothing was worth
a life,” Mr. Thanh said.

Mr. Thanh, 70, said he and his colleagues were unpaid and all expected to
die — more than 300 North Vietnamese photographers lost their lives. But their
motivation was different, he said.

“We wanted to show the American crimes of invading my country, and I felt I
could be useful doing that,” he said.

Mr. Thanh’s photo from the release is in the exhibit “The Photographers in
the North” in Perpignan until Sept. 14. The North Vietnamese photographers in
the exhibit worked for the army or for government newspapers and lived
alongside soldiers, sometimes in underground tunnels.

Joining Mr. Thanh in Perpignan were Cong Tinh, Mai Nam and Hua Kiem, who
also photographed on the northern side of the war. Their photos have rarely
been seen before in Europe.

The exhibit was the idea of Mr. Chauvel, who traveled to North Vietnam this
year along with Jean Francois Leroy, the director of the Visa Pour L’Image
photo festival. Mr. Chauvel has also published a book on the North Vietnamese
photographers, “Ceux du Nord,” and is making a documentary. The North
Vietnamese photographers’ images are equal to the great American photos from
the war. In Perpignan, seasoned conflict photographers in attendance were in
awe of their elderly North Vietnamese colleagues and gave them a long standing
ovation during the evening projections.

The exhibit and book satisfy Mr. Chauvel’s curiosity about the North
Vietnamese photographers who were often nearby — though unseen — during battles
he covered.

And it rights a wrong.

“Usually, history is written by people who won the wars, but it was written
by the losers in Vietnam,” Mr. Chauvel said. “This is the first time that the
North Vietnamese photographers are writing the story. It’s about time.”